Wideband and High-Gain D-Band Antennas for Next-Generation Short-Distance Wireless Communication Chips

This article presents two kinds of low-cost antennas for D-band short-distance wireless communication applications. Both the antennas are excited by a substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) feed line based on the printed circuit board (PCB) process. The first type is a stainless-steel-based horn antenna, fabricated by electric-discharging machining (EDM) process and selective laser melting (SLM) 3-D printing, respectively, for reducing cost. To integrate the horn antennas with the SIW feed line, a wideband transition structure from SIW to the rectangular waveguide is designed by suppressing higher order eigenmodes. The experimental data show that the integrated horn antenna can achieve 18.9% (129.5-156.5 GHz) -10 dB impedance bandwidth and a peak gain of 15.46 dBi. The second type of antenna is a single-layer rectangular patch antenna fed by SIW. By locally widening the SIW feed line to generate an equivalent shunt capacitance instead of using complex resonators, a wide impedance bandwidth can be realized. The measured -10 dB impedance bandwidth and the peak gain of the patch antenna are 20.8% (125.3-154.4 GHz) and 7.26 dBi, respectively. The two proposed antennas can provide comparable performance for different application requirements under the premise of a low fabrication cost.